Microsoft ­­has added an important component to its public cloud, Azure Event Grid, which is a fully-managed intelligent event routing service that allows communication through the publish-subscribe model. Azure Event Grid provides lightweight infrastructure for applications to exchange messages. On one side, there will be sources that generate data and raise an event, and on the other hand, there are interested parties consuming the data by responding to these events.

Microsoft is integrating a variety of Azure services with Event Grid that acts as the event sources. An application subscribed to an Event Grid topic may be notified each time a new virtual machine is provisioned, or a new document is uploaded to cloud storage. It is really up to the application on what it does with this data...

Imagine you are in charge of running a large manufacturing plant - let's say an electric car production facility. After you have placed a large order for solid state batteries, Werner, one of your trusted component suppliers walks your factory floor with you and stops in front of a raft of different CNC machines - some that cut or mould pieces; others assemble these and other parts together.

He points at them and says: "Recently we installed these super machines in our warehouses that can do pretty much anything and we have come up with a really exciting new business model. Would you be interested in hearing more about this?" Of course, any analogy goes only so far and comparing this setup to cloud computing is no different. But bear with me for a moment and ignore the logistics of raw materials and finished goods...

There's a new term that's stirring up interest and passion in the IT community. Funnily enough, it might herald the future of cloud computing, at least going by the amount of attention that major cloud vendors? -? Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM ?- ?are giving it. ‘Serverless' is the term that's causing ruckus but the awareness and understanding of serverless technologies and architectures is growing day by day.

What is serverless?

Serverless technologies are managed services that developers can use to build systems. These services can execute code, store data or perform other useful operations such as authentication. A common thread among these services is that the developer doesn't have access to the underlying infrastructure. There's no way to change hardware or update the operating system. Everything is managed and looked after by a vendor such as Amazon or Microsoft...

It’s always unfortunate to start the definition of a phrase by calling it a misnomer, but that’s where you have to begin with serverless computing: Of course there will always be servers. Serverless computing merely adds another layer of abstraction atop cloud infrastructure, so developers no longer need to worry about servers, including virtual ones in the cloud.

To explore this idea, I spoke with one of serverless computing’s most vocal proponents: Chad Arimura, CEO of the startup Iron.io, which develops software for microservices workload management. Arimura says serverless computing is all about the modern developer’s evolving frame of reference:...